1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a technology to control display of information for alerting the driver of a vehicle.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for alerting the drivers of vehicles are currently in widespread use. Applications for the ADAS include Lane Departure Warning (LDW), Forward Collision Warning (FCW), and Pedestrian Collision Warning (PCW). In the ADAS, traveling environment including white lines, preceding vehicles and vehicles approaching from the behind, pedestrians on the traveling directions, and so on are detected with sensors, such as on-vehicle cameras or on-board radars, to display information based on the results of the detection. The information is displayed on, for example, meter displays, head-up displays (HUDs), head-mounted displays or helmet-mounted displays (HMDs), or Smart Glasses.
As is known as a phenomenon “inattentional blindness” in general, it is difficult for the drivers to recognize objects other than the objects to which the drivers give attention if the objects simultaneously exist. Therefore, the ADAS in which information about the objects, such as vehicles on the front side and/or pedestrians, detected with the sensors is overlapped and displayed on the foreground of the drivers has been developed. With the ADAS, it is possible to present the information about the objects which the drivers do not aggressively search for or which the drivers do not pay attention to the drivers, thus realizing effective driver assistance.
Information presentation apparatuses in related art, for example, generate two-dimensional feature maps to generate saliency maps indicating the focuses of attention from the two-dimensional feature maps. The two-dimensional feature maps result from mapping of simple visual features in an initial phase of visual information processing of human beings on the same spatial coordinate system as that of camera images on the basis of features, such as areas or centroids, of objects in the camera images. The focuses of attention are areas to which the drivers of vehicles are easy to pay attention and, for example, are areas where images of the preceding vehicles appear. If the objects which the drivers do not pay attention appear, the information presentation apparatuses in the related art re-create the saliency maps to move the focuses of attention to the areas where the objects appear. The information presentation apparatuses in the related art present the information to the drivers on the basis of the focuses of attention that are moved (for example, refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-8772).
However, the technology in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-8772 has a problem in that the movement of the focuses of attention triggers sight line shifts of the drivers to increase the burdens on the drivers. The technology in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2011-8772 also has a problem in that the movement of the focuses of attention imposes a further burden on the drivers because the drivers pay attention to the focuses of attention that are moved to cause oversight.